by Mary Gentle
The Wild Machines shout grief and triumph, in her head. She felt power, beginning to peak. It moved in her below conscious thought, deep in the back of her soul, in the strongest of her reflexes, appetites, beliefs.
“I can find survival and victory where there’s no chance of one,” she says, smiling crookedly. “What do you think I’ve been doing all my life?”
‘AS A SOLDIER.’
“Long before that…”
She touches the woman surgeon’s brows, smoothing them with a feather-touch. Where her skin touches Florian’s scalp, the woman shivers with a deep, intense pain. Blood has matted in her straw-gold hair, with no fresh flow; but Ash can feel the skull swelling under her fingers. She should be in a hospital; she should be back at the abbey.
“Long before you, even,” she said, deceptively light. “Come on. Hold on. Good girl. When I was raped. When the Griffin-in-Gold were hung, to a man, as a defeated garrison. When Guillaume left me. When I whored so that I could eat. Then. Hold on. That’s it.”
‘SHE IS DYING, BURGUNDY IS PASSING.’
“We’ve got no time. Don’t argue.” Ash slipped her hand under the cuff of the woman’s doublet, feeling her shock-cold skin, and her pulse. “I’ve seen men hit like this before.”
‘SHE BREATHES, STILL—’
‘STILL HER HEART BEATS—’
The pressure in her head is unbearable.
“And I’ll do – my miracle – not yours.”
‘NO—’
Around her, at the walls in the darkness, men are killing each other. In panic, and in controlled fury. The light of the guttering torch shows her – for a second – Robert Anselm grabbing the Lion Azure standard as John Burren goes head-first over the broken masonry. The intense cold numbs her fingers, her face, her body. The fight goes on.
‘YOU WILL NOT—’
She feels their power. With the place in her soul that listens, that draws them down to her, she reaches for that power and tries to drain it into herself. They resist. She feels them, their immense minds, holding back.
“Now! ” she snarls. “Don’t you understand, I need her alive for this? She’s Burgundy.”
‘IT WILL BE NO USE!’ the Wild Machines protest, ‘WHAT USE TO REMOVE ONLY THE POWER OF MIRACLES, AND NOT YOUR RACE? IT WILL RETURN, AND HOW WILL WE STOP IT?’
Ash feels history, past and memory, all three, sliding into different shapes. A great hollow hunger grips her, not for this new future, but for her own reality.
Quietly, she says, “You need the nature of Burgundy, to make certain that miracles don’t happen.”
She is dazzled by the world that unfolds in her head and outside it: the Wild Machines, with the calculations of five thousand years, laying all the past and present out in front of her.
And, at the heart of them, faster than anything she can comprehend, new calculations happening.
With both hands – one bare, one bandaged; the cold numbing her pain – she rips at the neck of Florian’s doublet, gets a hand down on to her hot skin. And, careless of the filth on it, licks her other hand, and holds the wet skin beneath the woman’s nostrils, feeling the faintest feathering of breath.
She says aloud, “You need Burgundy, in eternity.”
Churned snow and mud are wet under her armoured knees. Blood stains her hose and boots. A wind blows up out of the dark, cold enough to make her eyes run, blind her. The last torch gutters.
She lifted her head and saw burning spatters of Greek Fire on the snow-blotched earth, and a golem striding over the fallen wall and lifting up the nozzle of a Greek Fire thrower.
A helmet-muffled roar sounded. An armoured man in Lion livery ran in front of her, brought the hammer-end of his poleaxe over and down: stone chips flew – and a gout of flame fell down with the golem’s shattered forearms, and licked at its bronze and granite torso.
“A Lion!” Robert Anselm’s familiar voice bellowed.
She opened her mouth to shout. The golem waved broken stone stumps. Robert Anselm threw himself face down in full armour in the dirt. The Greek Fire tank on the golem’s back went up in a soundless blue-white fireball.
In stark white light she sees the uneven line of fighting men outside the ruined chapel: the silhouettes of bow-shafts and hooked bills; the Lion standard; Frederick’s eagle-banner beyond; massed men and stone machines.
“Come and ’ave a go!” a male voice bellows, thirty feet away, over sudden local laughter. “If you think you’re hard enough!”
Broken walls cast stark shadows, everything black beyond. Men are shouting now above the noise of fighting, trying to outdo each other with cynical black humour.
“A Lion!” Anselm’s rallying voice: “A Lion!”
The heat of breath touched her. She did not turn her head.
In the corner of her vision, she sees a great needle-clawed paw set down upon the stone.
Under her hand, there is no detectable heartbeat; against her sweating skin, no whisper of a breath. But Florian’s flesh is warm.
She closes her eyes against the majesty of the Heraldic Beast that God’s grace – as reflected by the men and women of the Lion Azure – brings prowling out of the darkness.
“Now.”
She draws on them, drains them: the gold at the heart of the sun. She feels the unstoppable change beginning.
“I don’t lose,” she says, holding Florian to her. “Or if I do – you always save as many of your own as you can.”
It is the moment of change:
She is conscious of Floria’s weight. Not until then does she open her eyes again, looking at the snow trodden down black on the old abandoned altar, at snow-lined ruined walls, and see the familiarity.
But this is a younger wood, a different valley; there are no broken windows, no holly trees.
She has time to smile. Fortuna. Just chance.
As if her mind expands, she feels the immense ratiocinative power of the Wild Machines flow through her, envelop her, become a tool she can command. She can calculate, with the precision of the finest cut, what must become improbable – what must be reified, what made merely potential.
“Don’t let me down now.” Her hands grip Floria’s; her hands touch Burgundy. “Come on, girl!” And, quietly, in the dark, “To – a safe place.”
She wonders momentarily what every priest with God’s grace has felt, and if what she feels is the same.
Love for the world, however bitter, grief-stricken or brutal it may be. Love for her own. The will and the desire to protect.
In the authoritative voice that people obey, she says, “Do it!”
She moves Burgundy.
OBSERVATION TAPE ████████
Authority ████████
No. ████████
[tape hiss; noise of electrical switch]
WILLIAM DAVIES: [—inaudible—] a man with photosensitive epilepsy should not be watching the television.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Indeed. A man unaware of the last sixty years, however, should. I confess myself amazed. I had thought the popular tastes of the nineteen-thirties degraded. This is nothing but the vilest kind of mob entertainment.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: If I could introduce myself, Professor Davies –
[indistinguishable: background room noise]
VAUGHAN DAVIES: You are Ratcliff. Yes. If I may say so, it’s taken you long enough to come and see me. I see from your previous publications that you have a mind with some degree of rigor in its reasoning. May I be so happy as to suppose you have treated my work with adequate intelligence?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: I hope so.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: All men live in hope, Doctor Ratcliff. I believe I could drink a little tea. My dear, do you think you could manage that?
ANNA LONGMAN: I’ll ask the nurse if he can arrange it.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: William, perhaps you…
WILLIAM DAVIES: Don’t mind me. I’m quite comfortable here.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: I would pref
er to speak with Doctor Ratcliff in private.
[Indistinguishable: room noise, voices outside]
ANNA LONGMAN: [—inaudible—] some coffee, in the cafe here. Do you need your stick?
WILLIAM DAVIES: Good lord, no. A matter of a few yards.
[Indistinguishable: door opens and closes?]
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Doctor Ratcliff, I have been talking to that girl. Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell me where you have been for what, I understand, is the better part of three weeks?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Girl? Oh. Anna said that you appeared to be worried about me.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Answer the question, please.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: I don’t see the relevance of this, Professor Davies.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Damn you, young man, will you answer a question when it is put to you!
PIERCE RATCLIFF: I’m afraid I can’t say much.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Have you at any time in the recent past been in danger of your life?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: What? Have I what?
VAUGHAN DAVIES: This is a perfectly serious question, Doctor Ratcliff, and I would be obliged if you would treat it as one. I will make the matter clear in due course.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: No. I mean. Well, no.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: You returned from your archaeological expedition—
PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: Not mine. Isobel’s. Doctor Napier-Grant, that is.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: So many women. We appear to have become very degenerate. However. You returned from North Africa; you were not at any time in danger of an accident of any kind?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: If I was, I was unaware of it. Professor Davies, I really don’t understand you.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: The girl told me you have read the Sible Hedingham manuscript. That this somewhat idiosyncratic translation of it is your work.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Yes.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Then it is plain, to the meanest intelligence, what has been happening here! Do you wonder that I show some concern for a professional colleague?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Frankly, Professor Davies, you don’t seem like a man who shows much concern about his fellow man.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: No? No. Perhaps you are right.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: I didn’t come before because I was being interviewed—
VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: By whom?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: I don’t think it’s wise to go into that too much at the moment.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Is it possible that any member of your, archaeological expedition has been in an accident? An automobile accident, or something of a similar nature?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Isobel’s expedition. No. Isobel would have mentioned it. I don’t see what this has got to do with the Sible Hedingham manuscript.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: It is plain, from that document, what has occurred to us.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: The fracture in history, yes. [—inaudible—] this what you wrote in your Addendum to the second edition, if you did write it?
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Oh, I wrote it, Doctor Ratcliff. I had it in my pocket when I travelled to London. Any sensible publisher would have removed himself from London during the German bombing, but not—
PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: If we can get back to this. You read the Sible Hedingham document, you wrote about the fracture, and the ‘first history’—
VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: Yes, and it obviously needed publication as a matter of the greatest urgency. I had been so nearly right in my edition of the Ash papers. It was clear to me from the Sible Hedingham document that Burgundy had been, as it were, removed from us. Taken to a level of matter we cannot as yet detect – a happy thought: perhaps we may detect it, now?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: There are experiments going on in particle physics and probability theory, yes.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: You have reached the same conclusions as myself. It seems to be the case that, before this fracture, we were capable of consciously doing what other forms of life unconsciously do.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Collapsing the improbable and the miraculous into the real. The solid world, [pause] But it had me puzzled! The universe is real, yes, we see that. But the universe is uncertain. Ever since Heisenberg, we’ve known that; down on the sub-atomic level, things are fuzzy. Observing an experiment alters the results. You can know where a particle is, or its direction; never both. This isn’t solid, this isn’t real as the manuscript talks about it—
VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: If you would kindly stop pacing.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Sorry. But I see it: it is real. What Burgundy does is keep us consistent. If it was uncertain today, it will be uncertain in the same way tomorrow! Unchecked unreality is what it prevents. Randomness. We may not have a good existence, but we have a consistent one.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Of course, before we would have been able consciously to undo such stabilisation, such consistency. If you look at the twentieth century, Doctor Ratcliff – and I, at least, look on the latter half of it with a stranger’s eyes – you cannot claim this to be the best of all possible worlds. Man’s lot is still suffering, in the main. But it is a consistent reality. Human evil is limited to the possible. We have much for which to be thankful!
PIERCE RATCLIFF: The obvious example. I’ve thought about it. Think what Hitler would have done to the Jews, if he had been a wonder-worker, a man able to literally manipulate the stuff of reality. It would be all blond Aryans. There would have been no Jewish race. A Holocaust worse than the Holocaust.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: What Holocaust?
[Pause]
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Never mind. There would have been military research. People bred as weapons. Like Ash, yes, like Ash. A probability bomb – worse than a nuclear bomb. VAUGHAN DAVIES: Nuclear? Nuclear bomb?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: That’s – oh: difficult, that’s a – a bomb that—
VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: Rutherford! He did it, after all!
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Yes – no – never mind. Look.
[Pause]
VAUGHAN DAVIES: It is one of the more interesting paradoxes, don’t you think? That war, by nature of the organised thought required to wage it, reinforces the nature of a rational reality – while, at the same time, the destruction it causes in its effects leads to chaos.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: That’s why she understood it, isn’t it?
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Ash? Yes. I believe so.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: I couldn’t understand it, you see. Until I understood that Burgundy’s still there, still doing what it’s been doing. We have it in the species-mind, and in our unconscious, as a lost and golden country. But at the same time it has this quite genuine scientifically verifiable existence on a different level of reality, and it carries on with its function.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Doctor Ratcliff, are you aware of the possible reason why things are coming back?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: I understand how things could be left over. No process is perfect, the universe is large and complex, and what Ash and the Wild Machines did – it’s not surprising if some of the evidence of the first history wasn’t expunged. Reality has its own weight. It’s been gradually squeezing the anomalies out – things becoming legendary, mythic, fictional.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: The manuscript evidence.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: A statue here, a helmet there. Ash’s words turning up in someone else’s mouth. I can understand all of that. There was a single fracture, it did what it did, and we see the evidence as it – fades.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: The false history that appeared with the fracture – in which, for example, Charles the Bold dies after a siege, but at Nancy – has, here and there, some fragments of the true history embedded in it. For example, the chronicles that the del Guiz family would have written, after fourteen seventy-seven.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Not as they existed before the fracture, but as they would have existed, if history had just carried on. Five-hundred-year-old evidence sliding back into the interstices of history. The Fraxinus manuscript too. It might quite reasonably have existed
.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Yes. That is quite clear. I wonder, Doctor Ratcliff, if you quite appreciate the significance of the Sible Hedingham document in this respect?
PIERCE RATCLIFF: You remind me very much of my old professor, if you don’t mind me saying so, Professor Davies. He used to ask me a trick question just like that.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Do you know what is most strange to me? You are giving me the respect you believe is due to an older man. In my mind, Doctor Ratcliff, I am a younger man than you are.
[Indistinguishable: traffic noise – window open? Tape hiss. Pause before speech resumes]
PIERCE RATCLIFF: The Sible Hedingham document is more improbable. It’s what Ash would have written – no, she’d have to have dictated it to someone – but done it after fourteen seventy-seven, after the fracture. Perhaps left it in England after a visit to the Earl of Oxford.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Doctor Ratcliff, I intended to warn you, and now I will do it. The possible reason why things are coming back. My theory is that the reappearance of these highly improbable artefacts is a consequence of Burgundy’s function failing in some way.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: I’d thought – I was afraid – Yes. Improbable happenings, things that aren’t rational, predictable. But – why would it be breaking down? Why now?
VAUGHAN DAVIES: For that, you will have to understand how lost Burgundy does what it does; and I believe, since I am sixty years behind current scientific development, that I am not qualified to put forward a theory. What I will do, if permitted, is to give you my warning.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Sorry. Yes. Please. What is it?
VAUGHAN DAVIES: What happened to me, happened because of the Sible Hedingham manuscript. I discovered it in Hedingham Castle, in late nineteen thirty-eight. It is my belief that it had not – existed, if you like – much before that time.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: The probability wave being locally collapsed. An artefact becoming real.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: Just as in North Africa, a few months ago.
PIERCE RATCLIFF: Carthage.
VAUGHAN DAVIES: I had been staying at my brother’s house as I completed my second edition, and researching the Oxfords, because of the de Vere connection with Ash. I theorise now that the Sible Hedingham manuscript became reified, if you like, not long after I arrived. I stole the manuscript—
